XIII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2021

Anna Burns was awarded the Booker Prize for her novel “Milkman” in 2018. This book is as much extraordinarily as the author’s figure.

Anna Burns began her literary career when she was 30 years old and soared to the heights having won the conservative British public and literary critics. In her main work “Milkman” Anna Burns raised actual problems of modern society such as violence and the role of women in a society. The author also described a very difficult and significant historical period of 1970s in the Northern Ireland. It is the period of ethnic political conflict between the political parties of the Northern Ireland and British authorities on the status of the region. The conflict cost lives of nearly 3.500 people on both sides.

Until recently, the conflict of the Northern Ireland is often considered exclusively in political and economic terms. The novel by Anna Burns is worth reading because the author re-evaluated our outlook on the problem of more than 50 years ago and mainstreamed it again. This novel explores a quite different issue – it’not a policy of that time but elusive feelings and ruined lives. In any political, military conflict there's always a human sacrifice. Considering the ethnic political conflict in the Northern Ireland both politicians and historians didn’t take into account people’s destinies.

In many ways Anna Burns follows a new “fashionable” tendency, which has penetrated not only into literary, but also historical world - “Big politics” through the eyes of “little” people. Besides, Burns really captured the atmosphere prevailing in the country of that time - voltage, fatigue, expectations of imminent misfortune, self-distrust.

The writer has chosen non-standard presentation of her vision of the issues raised – through the method “Stream of consciousness”. Almost all British literary awards are characterized by the canonicity and tradition of literary forms.Such work as “Milkman” has pioneering approach despite the fact that this literary method emerged in the XIXth century and was represented in the works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in the first half of the XXth century. The peculiarity of this approach is that characters did not have names. On the one hand, it allows a reader to think like a character. The reader asks a question: “What would I do in this situation?”. But on other hand, this technique does not demonstrate one individual human with his unique judgments and actions. It demonstrates the “face” of the whole society.

“Milkman” made a long and arduous way before the most important victory and readers' applause were deserved. Burns encountered a lack of understanding in large publishing houses like many other modern authors.

Publishing editors doesn’t understand the main idea of the author. But the result of many years of fight was the Booker Prize 2018 with the comment of British philosopher and writer Kwame Anthony Appiah, who said: “Nobody of us has ever read anything like that”.

Public representatives try to restrain the novel by modern frames of fashion movement #MeToo, which is becoming more radical and hateful. The author was told that the novel is out of time, out of social boundaries. This fact demonstrates the universality of her work. It should be noted that the novel in many ways ranges over both past and present problems. For example, one of the main heroines dared to resist a man, thus unwillingly opposed herself to a society. The problem of women’s status in a society is considered to be the perpetual problem that draws public attention worldwide.